The translation industry in numbers: what you should know

The translation industry in numbers: what you should know

Translation is one of the biggest industries worldwide. Considering there are many languages, it makes sense that there are different possibilities of combinations for language pairings, there are different kinds of services provided, etc.

Translation services are, indeed, an integral part of the global economy, which helped the necessity for formal translation services expand enormously. It is widely known that countries are communicating even more so all kinds of documents need translation. The same happens when brands expand to different territories and need to communicate with customers. Therefore, the translation industry continues positioning as one of the biggest across the globe.

Talking about numbers, according to Statista, the global language services industry market size reached more than 45 billion USD and will rise to almost 56.2 billion by 2021. This shows how big the industry is and how the tendency is still towards expansion.

Want to know more? This is all you need to know about the translation industry in numbers:

In terms of region, in 2018, North America held a 39.41% share of the global language services, making it the biggest region demanding such services.

Only 27% of the Internet speaks English. In fact, reports state that 2 out of every 5 Internet users don’t browse in English.

According to Department of Labor in the US, by 2024 the translation and interpretation industry is expected to grow by about 29%.

Translation and Interpretation are expected to be one of the fastest growing professions worldwide.

According to recent studies, the number of professional translators worldwide is about 330,000.

By the early 2010s, cloud translation tools started to expand cross users in the industry. This tendency remained and, by 2017, such tools gained widespread adoption with firms reporting:

Memsource had more than 100,000 users.

SmartCAT had over 70,000 translators available on the platform.

Given the expansion of the use of tools and technology, different studies focused on examining their advantages. One study reported that implementing translation memory saves 36% of the translation budget. For the purpose of studying, they used a sample of 516.5 million words translated in Memsource and they focused on the worth of translations from the top 100 users. In the sample, 38% of the segments had some kind of match and 14.6% were repetitions, which allowed users to save costs and time.